Hi! I’m Shane,

Thanks for stopping by, I appreciate you taking an interest in my work and wanting to learn a bit more about me.

My work is an ode to sensuality. I am inspired by feelings of loneliness and longing, and the suggestive razor-thin crescent of a newly waxing moon.

The most rewarding work I’ve done has been showing women a different perspective of themselves, especially ones who feel self conscious. As I show them how to be comfortable in front of the camera, and give themselves permission to be vulnerable, I have the opportunity to learn their story and find ways to creatively express their inner lives. As an artist, it is the best kind of creative challenge.

Being a photographer was all I wanted to do, even before I knew it. As a quiet and introverted kid I’d feel preemptive nostalgia, a sense of wanting to savor a moment I knew would never return, and captivated by soft incandescent light on my the faces of my relatives. In high school I used my mom’s old Nikon camera to take portraits of my friends and girlfriends.

My visual sense improved as I studied European painters, Caravaggio and Rembrandt in particular. I learned how to use natural light and shadow to convey form, and how to use composition to convey feelings. More importantly, I learned how to make others feel at ease and remove doubts so they can be their natural self in front of the camera.

Over time I had a realization, that art is an expression of one’s consciousness, and can offer a viewer a fundamentally different perspective of the world and one’s own self. I looked back with a new understanding and reassessed what I had been doing, and how my work affects people.

The thing that finally made me decide commit to this path was when I heard from a woman I had shot with. She wrote to me about how she had been through a divorce before working with me, and had not felt beautiful in many years. The art we made together gave her a new way of seeing herself, mysterious and sensual.

When I’m not doing photography, I also enjoy making clay pottery, working in my garden, volunteering, and axe-throwing with my friends.

My DNA

These are the tenets that have guided me on my path as an artist:

Sculpting with Light and Dark.

I adore dynamic interplay of light and shadow, whether working with black and white or in color. As an aesthetic, it provides a dramatic rendering that is both natural and poetic, conveying a what I describe as a “layer of abstraction” that allows a work to be suggestive of a feeling instead of simply descriptive of appearances.
I elaborated on this topic here.

Sensuality

I consider sensuality and its expressions to be sacred, to be appreciated without judgement. I strive to convey its complexities in my work, as nothing is ever purely black and white. For instance, I try to temper exuberant passion with a feeling of bittersweet longing.

I am BDSM friendly, and I have experience tying shibari, Japanese style rope bondage.

Naturalness

Photography is first and foremost way to express and explore the soul. I’ve found that the secret to truly unique, soulful, and vulnerable work is to be vulnerable and allow time to work slow, giving my subjects time to become comfortable and drop the masks they wear in daily life. I limit my selection of clients and keep session times open ended because each person has their own pace, and I have found that that is more important than anything else.
I wrote an essay about this topic here.

An extension of this métier is my practice of allowing sessions to take their own form. Just as we are all unique individuals, we are also each a different person than we were even a month ago. When I plan a session, I always leave space for new ideas and spontaneous decisions inspired by the person my subject is in that moment. To quote Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching:

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.